Substitution
by 21stCenturyBoudicca
Summary: "He just needed Charles to shoot him in the head." Explains why Erik wanted Charles to shoot him in the head. Includes some fun stuff on envisioning internal environments, and on cycles of violence.


Warnings: mentions of the camps, gun violence, psychological abuse, about half-a-hint of slash. Not for lack of trying, but they just wouldn't go there today.

XXXXX

Erik eyed the borrowed revolver thoughtfully. Cradling it, easing his fingers into its curves and hidden dips, he began to clean it with a rough cloth. The animal pleasure of holding metal thrilled through his fingers, but he refused to manipulate the it with his mind. It was a routine Herr Doktor had beaten into him.

Erik could feel the man in his mind, standing directly behind, pressed into his back, his hips tight on his back as they had been when he was small. The sick whiteness of the instrument room, the antiseptic smell seeping off of the linoleum floor, the bitter quake of fear in his belly. Herr Doktor smelled of rotten-oranges while he guided Erik silently, shoving the barrel cleaner in and out.

Standing in the streaming sunlight in Charles's mansion, Erik popped out the rounds one by one, lining each up on the window-sill. He pulled out the barrel-cleaner. Twisting his wrist back and forth, he prepared the shaft. A few buffs of the cleaning cloth, bullets reloaded, chamber empty, it was ready to go.

He floated the clean gun into his pants' pocket, and strode towards to opening door.

As he reached with his power for the knob, he was struck still with the memories of a dozen doors which would never open for him. When he had learned to clean guns, learned their innards and could aim them true, Herr Doktor had begun hunting him. Through the camps he chased the thin boy, yelling, commanding him to stop a bullet. Erik had hidden, too afraid to use his power. Hearing the mad man approach, he would start running again. This was one of Erik's daily torment; it could begin at any time. When he was sleeping, he listened for the man's footsteps. At dinner. During a lesson on knife-play.

Once, terribly, during his few minutes of quiet reading time. That day Herr Doktor had been furious to see Erik sitting quietly on his bed, not practicing violence, simply still in his own mind. He had run at him, waving the pistol as Erik ducked under his arms and fled to the edge of the camp. Herr Doktor herded him into the basement of the officers' living quarters, slamming the single door to the surface behind him.

In a corridor of doors, Erik found each of them made of wood or stone or plastic or glass. It was a floor prepared for him. He fled to the far corner of the hallway. Herr Doktor stalked towards him, barrel never wavering in the flickering light of the single hanging bulb. He stood over him pointed the sulfur-spewing gun barrel at his face.

"You can stop this bullet; you could have stopped your mother's bullet. I am going to count to three."

Erik screwed up his face, trying to concentrate on slamming the trigger through Herr Doktor's finger.

"One."

He was shaking with effort, raising his hands to claw and grasp at the air.

"Two."

He couldn't feel the gun, couldn't touch it with his power. His mind was a rage of white noise, shrill screaming, and pounding fear. He closed up, hid away inside himself.

"Three-" *BANG*

The bullet caught him in the shoulder, tearing through his tattered uniform and burying itself in the stone behind him, spraying his back with cutting shrapnel. Herr Doktor squatted down, bringing his eyes to the level of Erik's.

"Let's try that again."

It took three bullet wounds and a soiled pair of pants, but Erik deflected the fourth bullet.

The daily hunt didn't stop then. To teach him to stop the bullets rather than deflecting them, he made him practice in the middle of the rock-breaking line. When he failed, men were maimed or killed. When he succeeded, he saw his monstrousness reflected back in their sunken, dull eyes. He let him watch the firing squads, commanding him to stop all of the bullets at once. He never could. Until the day he escaped, every day someone died for Herr Doktor's practice.

Wrenching the door open, Erik stood into the lush corridor, gun twisting the hang of his soft pants.

XXXXX

Erik strode to the fence in the middle of Charles's absurdly large lawn. He hadn't had a home since before the ghetto, but he could feel his body and mind easing into a routine. It disturbed him; his reason for existing, the thought which had fed him when he had no food, comforted him when he was alone, was unfulfilled. At night, alone in his warmly-lit room, he plotted his vengeance. But each morning, he awoke to eggs and toast and the smiling drama of teenagers. He could feel himself filling a role here, finding a place here. Growing soft here.

He had carried no routine from the camps out with him more faithfully than that of constant gun practice. He jammed muggers' guns in Prague, froze burglars' bullets in London, reprieved condemned men from mafioso's machine-guns in Milan. Every day, he practiced, seeking opportunities to use his power on guns.

Bullets were his ultimate test-their speed, their precision, occasionally their number all tested his control.

But he had never sought to fill the hated Herr Doktor's place, never sought a partner to push him.

Until now.

He felt full with Charles. Caverns inside of himself, usually filled with crashing waves anxiety and lapping hate, were emptying out in a first-ever tide. Slowly refilling with feelings of belonging and attachment. The warm feelings were rough on his sense of self; Erik knew his internal landscape: barren and craggy it may be but it was stable and known. Contentment, happiness, comfort; none of these had ever set root in his soil before. He felt the need to twist the new feelings, to make them back into something he understood. He looked for selfishness, hidden bigotry, accusations of monstrousness. He could find it in those around him, as he had in everyone he had ever met, but try as he could he could not exaggerate it sufficiently to block out the soft feelings coming from his new home. He new colleague.

Seeing Charles approach over the grass, Erik shook out his shoulders. He would make this training into something with which he was familiar.

XXXXX

"You're sure?"

Erik had explained that he practiced with bullets every day, and that he would like the opportunity to practice in a controlled environment. Charles, true to his word, had not pried, and so did not know where this habit had come from, or whose shoes he was filling.

Erik felt fantastic. Things were finally making sense. Charles was just another man, pointing another gun at Erik's head. The sulfur smelled the same, the bullets felt the same. He was ready to demonstrate his progress.

"I'm sure."

Erik was grinning. He would deflect the bullet on the first try, here where no one could get hurt, and move on.

"All right."

Everything was going right.

"No. No, I can't, I'm sorry. I can't shoot anybody point-blank, let alone my friend."

Erik's mind stuttered. _This wasn't about you, Charles._ He thought._ I _need _this._

"Oh, come _on." _Erik says, trying to be light. "You know I can deflect it." _Deflect, stop, jam, _he could do any of those if Charles just followed through. Seeing him unconvinced, he pivoted:

"You're always telling me I should push myself."

Charles wouldn't pry, but there was a feel of desperate need in Erik's mind that did not match up with the situation. Charles needed to reframe the situation.

"If you know you can deflect it, then you're notchallenging yourself." Erik was stricken, rebellious.

"Whatever happened to the man who was – who was trying to raise a submarine?"

Erik was stunned; everything was falling apart. His mind was spinning into the white noise again, the waves thundering against his cavern walls. He heard his voice say,

"I can't."

The crashing wasn't just in Erik's mind; Charles had to concentrate to keep Erik's rising panic out.

"No, the anger's not enough."

_No, no, NO_. _This couldn't be happening_. Erik had had a plan. He pulled up away from himself, outside of himself, as he had been on dozens of the hunts. He said coldly:

"Well, it's gotten the job done all this time."

_Yes, it had_. It had kept him safe in Prague and London and Milan. He was fine. He just needed Charles to shoot him in the head.

"It's nearly gotten you killed all this time."

_No._ Erik could feel himself shutting down, protecting himself against the change he knew Charles was going to push on him.

Then Charles touched him.

It wasn't a use of his powers, just the electric exchange between a positive and negative body. The bond between them, struggling to even out their charges, sapped some of Erik's flailing emotions and gave him a taste of Charles's inner quiet.

"Let's try something a little more challenging."

Hypnotized by their continued contact, Erik stared at the dish, his self-induced tunnel-vision widening just enough to show him a massive challenge.

"See that? Try turning it to face us."

_This was different_. Erik thought. Charles wasn't standing behind him-_though he wouldn't mind that_-but beside him. The smaller man was smiling, excited to be sharing a chance to learn together. _Not another teacher. A . . . friend?_

Erik felt an earthquake in his mind; his internal landscape was shaking and sliding, centered on the idea of _friend_. Through the noise that change was making, Erik heard Charles's voice. Carefully casual, he said:

"You know, I believe that true focus lies somewhere between rage and serenity."

The quaking stopped. There was a terrible stillness inside. _He looks lost_, Charles thought._ Maybe I can_-

"Do you mind if I-?"

Charles stepped onto Erik's internal landscape. As a student of minds, he knew he was experiencing a brief spell of quiet before the quakes began again. They were how a troubled mind reoriented itself around startling information. Erik's landscape was grey, beaten into horrible shapes, pitted and carved out. But even in the toughest rock glorious desert plants could grow. Charles saw some glints of green in the shade of black outcroppings, much of it new. Some old, long barren trees had the misty look of spring about them.

He walked carefully towards such a tree, and saw worn into its whorls the exact memory he had been hoping for. Preserved in unbending hardwood, protected by the ugliness which surrounded it from vandals like Shaw and the hundreds of men who had seen Erik has a tool, was a perfect memory.

Before he left, Charles planted the seed of a simple idea by the roots of his mother's tree: _To be human is to be mixed-up. Anxiety and contentment, Hate and happiness. Their flows can mix in your caverns, their flowers grow in your rock. You can use both rage and serenity._

That planted, Charles withdrew, making sure Erik experienced that first kind memory he had found.

"What did you just do to me?"

"I accessed the brightest corner of your memory system." Charles half-answered. _Later, later he would explain about the seed_. "It's a very beautiful memory, Erik, thank you."

"I didn't know I still had that." He could feel another shift coming, another earthquake. His mind would reshape itself so that the whorls on that one tree were even more protected than before.

"There's so much more to you than you know." Charles looked deeply into Erik's eyes, mind not prying, trying to project the truth of his words without his powers. "Not just pain and anger. There's good, too. I felt it. When you can access all of that, you'll possess a power that no one can match. Not even me. So, come on."

Erik could feel something was different inside, but wanted to show his friend that he could learn from kindness as well as pain.

"Try again."


End file.
